Sarah Chew covers Southeast Asia’s technology, fintech, digital policy, and AI adoption landscape for RECATOOLS. Her work focuses on how regulation, platform shifts, and emerging technologies affect businesses, consumers, and digital markets across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

129
Articles
ASEAN Tech
Primary beat
May 2026
Writing since
~915 min
Total reading
All 129 ASEAN Tech 71 Finance 51 Business 4 AI & ML 3

Articles Showing 1–10 of 129

Ethernet cables plugged into the back of a white home broadband router
ASEAN Tech

Two ASEAN countries tie your broadband to the speed you were sold, and only one checks

Malaysia requires 90% of your subscribed fibre speed and collects the results quarterly. Thailand sets 70% of the advertised speed and then exempts that indicator from measurement. Singapore requires a typical speed to be published without saying how to compute it; Indonesia has no fixed-broadband speed standard at all.

20 Sep 2026 · 11 min read
A red and black full-face motorcycle helmet resting on a parked bike in a street
ASEAN Tech

A helmet can meet the standard Philippine law names and still be illegal there

The Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia all build their helmet rules on the same UN regulation, but only Malaysia accepts the European mark as legally sufficient. A Philippine rider needs a domestic PS or ICC sticker on top — and a helmet brought in from abroad needs clearance before it is worn.

20 Sep 2026 · 10 min read
A tape rule in shallow focus, its inch and metre graduations legible
ASEAN Tech

Singlife Says AI Cut Handling Time 30%. It Never Published the Baseline.

A year on from launch there is still no starting figure and no headcount, so the improvement has nothing public to be measured against.

20 Sep 2026 · 5 min read
Cargo ships at anchor on open water at sunset, seen from the air
ASEAN Tech

ASEAN Pulls Its Upgraded Trade Pact Forward. The Date Is Not Settled.

Singapore's deputy prime minister named the end of this year. The host country's own readout of the same meetings gives no timeline at all.

20 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
Rows of gold and silver chains hanging on display in a jewellery shop
Finance

The 916 on a gold chain means something different in Malaysia and Singapore

Malaysian regulations make the fineness stamp compulsory, fix 22 karat as 916 rather than 917, and force the receipt to separate metal from workmanship. Singapore requires neither stamp nor assay, and its precious-metals statute never mentions purity at all.

19 Sep 2026 · 7 min read
The colonnaded stone facade of a classical Singapore building, a Singapore flag flying at the left and flowering shrubs below
Finance

A Singapore credit report can come back with no score at all

Credit Bureau Singapore grades borrowers AA to HH — but five other grades carry no score, and two of them are adverse findings rather than a blank slate. An unsettled default is displayed indefinitely, and the thirty per cent utilisation rule imported from American advice does not exist here.

19 Sep 2026 · 8 min read
An excavator seen from directly above, working bare earth marked with track lines
ASEAN Tech

Singapore Is Testing Excavators With No One in the Cab

JTC wants one operator supervising two machines. The reason it gives is not cost, and the trial is running where nobody walks past.

19 Sep 2026 · 5 min read
Office towers in Singapore's central business district photographed from street level at dusk
ASEAN Tech

Anthropic Opens in Singapore on the Strength of One Statistic

Nine roles, a general manager hired from Google Cloud, and a per-capita usage figure the company measured about its own product. No revenue, no customers, no headcount.

19 Sep 2026 · 5 min read
Jakarta office towers rising through daytime haze above low-rise rooftops
ASEAN Tech

Indonesia Sets Child-Safety Fines at 6% of Global Revenue

A foreign platform is measured against its worldwide turnover; an Indonesian medium firm against a fixed ceiling of about US$568,000. The gap is the policy.

19 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
Dense Jakarta traffic in haze, with motorbike riders packed between city buses and taxis on a multi-lane road
ASEAN Tech

Green SM Calls Jakarta Its First International Market. It Is Not.

The press release went round the world with that claim attached. Underneath it is the part that matters: what Vingroup is willing to pay Jakarta's motorbike drivers to switch.

18 Sep 2026 · 7 min read
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